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The subject of colour has long fascinated Frank Jackson. Perhaps one reason that colours have fascinated Jackson is that they represent a striking instance of what he has called a ‘location problem’. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 sketches Jackson's solution to ‘the location problem for colours’. Section 3 argues that Jackson's attempted resolution of the clash between the two axioms of the folk theory fails because of its inconsistency with other firm folk intuitions about colours. In Section 4, after agreeing with Jackson that the folk theory entails both axioms, it is argued that these axioms imply a conception of colours as simple, non-physical, intrinsic properties of objects. Section 5 takes up the issue of why Jackson rejects this primitivist conception of colours and the easy solution it provides to the apparent clash between his two basic axioms. Section 6 examines the exclusion assumption and its role in his argument for the conclusion that colours must be physical properties. Section 7 outlines a conception of causation according to which non-physical properties as well as physical properties can both cause colour experience in ways that do not compete with each other and do not exclude each other.

This chapter considers the role that the experience of colour plays in having colour concepts. It is argued that the experience which is relevant to having colour concepts is experience that informs thoughts about what would happen if there were colour-affecting interventions on an object. Thus, the relevant kind of experience is conscious attention to the objects of colours as an aspect on which direct intervention is possible. However, an interventionist account of colour concepts requires that one can, in fact, directly intervene on colour. This issue is addressed by considering Locke's classic example of changing an almond's colour by pounding it. While Locke uses this example to argue for an error in our ordinary concept of colour, the chapter offers a vindication of our common-sense conception of colour, as something on which direct intervention is possible.

A relationalist treatment of the phenomenology of color is offered in this chapter. It explores the accusation that color relationalism is inconsistent with the ordinary color phenomenology, and that it cannot be coherently combined with plausible theories of the nature of color phenomenology. To defend relationalism against both types of phenomenological objections, the aim of this chapter is to illustrate that color relationalism is not in conflict with the phenomenological evidence about color once one understands just how phenomenology can be useful in addressing questions of color ontology and that it presents no special difficulties regarding the metaphysics of color experience. Furthermore, the threat of regress dissolves when it is seen that it depends crucially on substitution instances that one has reason to reject, and that relationalism is not ungrounded in any sense that would prevent understanding of the theory.

This chapter concerns the role of perception in understanding. More specifically, it investigates the role that conscious experience plays in a subject’s coming to understand the meaning of a word through ostensive definition, as well as the role it plays in a subject’s being justified in the subsequent use of the word. The chapter focuses on color words in particular (e.g., “red,” “yellow”) and argues that, in the ostensive definition of these words, color experience provides knowledge of their reference. Knowledge of reference, the chapter claims, is required for the subject to understand the definition and justifies the subject’s subsequent use of the color term. The chapter contrasts his view with the view he attributes to Wittgenstein, according to which attention to color requires and is thus not prior to ordinary talk about color.

Numerous authors have claimed that color relationism is simply not compatible with the deliverances of introspectible experience. But is the non-relationality of color as easily recovered from experience as has been claimed? This chapter addresses this major objection to relationism, and tackles the implications for color adverbialism in particular. It is argued that the objectors to relationism have yet to demonstrate that experiences of color per se—and not experiences of objects with color, shape, size, and numerous other properties—are the source of their intuition that colors are out there in the world, and perceiver independent. Phenomenology, it is argued, is uncommitted about the ontological issues. Moreover, the objectors have yet to show that their supposed phenomenological facts are independent of theoretical views about the nature of color. Color adverbialism is no more vulnerable to phenomenological objections than other versions of relationism. Finally, the material presented suggests new ways to think about the phenomena of color constancy.

This chapter presents a semantic theory of color experience, on which color experience represents or denotes color properties, and attributes these properties to visual objects. Utilizing the concept of representation is vital to any semantic theory, and in the theory offered here, the semantic relationships operate via the vehicle of a systematic set of similarity relations. Color experience informs us about the external world by means of a semantic relationship—representation or denotation—that it bears to external world properties, and it attributes these properties to external objects. It is further argued here that our understanding of these perceptual relations is innate, and that the similarity relations in question are dynamic in the sense that they are constitutively linked to certain cognitive changes in the perceiver subsequent to color perception.

“Primitivist dispositionalism” combines the basic insights worth saving from dispositionalism and primitivism, by taking color to be an “appearance property,” such as your aunt’s looking young, her youthful appearance. Chapter 6 argues that to see a color is to see an appearance property, just as to see your aunt’s youthful appearance is to see an appearance property. A model for appearance properties is outlined here, the metaphysical implications of primitivist dispositionalism are addressed, and it is shown that the apple does indeed look like it was in Eden, namely, “gloriously, perfectly, and primitively red” (Chalmers 2006, 49). The resulting account of color is dispositional, in that there is nothing to being red beyond looking red. Nevertheless, by giving due credit to the phenomenology of color experience that makes primitivism appealing, it offers a way for us to remain on Earth, yet feel like we’re in Eden.

This chapter argues for Mind-Independence, the claim that colours are properties of things in our environment whose essential nature is constitutively independent of the experiences of perceiving subjects. The line of argument developed for Mind-Independence is that it best explains a number of related aspects of the phenomenology of colour experience associated with the phenomenon of colour constancy. The first section describes the relevant aspects of the phenomenology of colour experience, arguing that a straightforward explanation is provided by the view that colours are mind-independent properties of physical objects. The following sections argue that this explanation is superior to that provided by views according to which colours are mind-dependent properties.

This chapter considers the relationship between naïve realist theories of colour and the epistemological thesis that Johnston calls ‘Revelation’: the thesis that the essential natures of the colours are revealed in visual experience. Although naïve realism and Revelation are often associated, this chapter argues that naïve realist theories of colour do not entail, and indeed are often inconsistent with, the epistemological thesis that the essential natures of the colours are revealed in colour experience. The naïve realist can accept that perceptual experiences acquaint us with the colours; but the naïve realist can and should insist that knowledge of their essential natures requires theoretical inquiry.

This chapter considers a common line of objection to Distinctness: the Causal Exclusion Argument. According to the Causal Exclusion Argument, distinct mind-independent colours are causally excluded from explaining the occurrence of colour experiences. This is a variation on an argument familiar from discussions of mental causation. It is argued that although we ordinarily believe that colours cause colour experiences, there are reasons to suppose that colours stand in a different kind of causal relationship to colour experiences from that of physical properties like surface reflectance profiles. As well as providing a response to the Causal Exclusion Argument, this difference in the kind of causal relationship that colours and physical properties stand in grounds a further argument for Distinctness.

This chapter introduces the reader to the philosophical debate around color and gives an overview of the central themes and conclusions of the book. It proposes that there are two distinct ways of setting up the problem of color ontology. The first is through cases of perceptual variation (as illustrated by Betrand Russell) and the second is through the clash of the “manifest” and “scientific images” (as illustrated by Arthur Eddington and Wilfrid Sellars). Comparisons are drawn between the debate over color and other topics in philosophy concerning the nature of perceptual experience, the relationship between neurophysiology and psychology, and more generally, the place of mind in nature.

This chapter sets forth and defends a position concerning the content of visual color-experiences, the content of color-attributing judgments, and the metaphysics of color. Color experiences have systematically non-veridical content: they present external objects as instantiating properties that those objects never instantiate. Color-attributing judgments, however, are often veridical: they attribute to external objects not the properties that are presented in visual color experiences, but rather certain Lockean dispositions to produce such colof-experiences—and these dispositional properties are often instantiated by the objects to which they are attributed. On the basis of this account, the chapter proposes a general distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities. Presentational primary qualities are often instantiated and are identical to the corresponding judgmental primary qualities. Presentational secondary qualities, however, are never instantiated; nonetheless, judgmental secondary properties often are instantiated, and they are Lockean dispositions to produce experiences as-of the instantiation of those presentational secondary properties.

In this paper I investigate the problems for “locating” color in the world, surveying the various subjectivist and objectivist positions and finding them wanting. I then argue that the problem is that colors are “ways of appearing,” an odd kind of property that essentially implicates the mind and turns the problem of locating color into part of the mind–body problem. Rather than identify colors with objective surface features, such as surface spectral reflectance, or with dispositions to cause certain internal mental states, I treat them as relations holding between the subject and the objects of perception. This is seen to explain why colors are so hard to locate, and also accounts for several other features of color experience.

This chapter explores the experiences of another blind person—this time a woman named Isabel—with particular focus on issues of gender and sexual orientation. Unlike the previous chapter's case study, Isabel has been blind all her life, and has to take her cues about cultural and social norms while at the same time attempting to hide her blindness. The experience of color is of particular note, as beyond its aesthetic values color also informs certain Western preoccupations—such as, for example, the color of one's skin. As well, the mere sound of one's voice or the language used can, in effect, “color” their perceptions of what the other person is like. Many other “sighted” constructs of reality also make their way to the blind, as even such cultural notions of how a woman should look continue to preoccupy women who attempt to reach for the sighted world.